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What is Identity?

Seeing Self-Sovereign Identity in Historical Context

Kaliya Young · June 21, 2022 ·

Seeing-Self-Sovereign-Identity-in-Historical-ContextDownload

Abstract

A new set of technical standards called Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is emerging, and it reconfigures how digital identity systems work. My thesis is that the new configuration aligns better with the emergent ways our social systems in the west have evolved identity systems to  work at a mass scale and leverage earlier paper-based technologies.

To make this case  I trace two different histories. The first follows the ways in which  identities were designed and managed in computer systems.  The innovations in SSI are a major breakthrough in the design of computer identity systems. The second history examines the evolution of paper-based identity systems that emerged in Europe. This section integrates  recent scholarship about the emergence of a particular social-psychology that came with  the first paper-based identity documents. This work explains what paper based identities meant and why they were accepted and made sense to people. The last section of the paper brings these two histories together and explains why the underlying technological design of SSI aligns  with Western liberal democratic values in a way that the earlier digital identity systems designs do  not.

Introduction 

Developers and policymakers think about social and technological systems as a given in the present moment. The assumption that current systems are a given applies to paper-based identity systems, digital identity systems, and the social systems that we relate to and use to form our identities. This paper adopts a materialist approach that sees all things as the result of processes.  

The first section of the paper reviews the basics of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technology for readers unfamiliar with it —however, it is not intended to be a history of how SSI developed. 

The second section of the paper provides a view of how digital identity systems have evolved since the emergence of computers. This section makes critical differences between those earlier systems clear for non-experts. For example, the new self-sovereign identity systems reduce the inherent opportunities for tracking and, therefore, the privacy risks of earlier digital identity systems and the current dominant technical architecture of enterprise identity and access management. 

The third part of the paper looks at the history of paper-based identity systems that are in widespread use today. It explains  how they work and why they make effective trade-offs between accountability and visibility across systems. This section begins tracing  this history further back than most other accounts —beginning with the actions of the Catholic Church around 500 CE. This section integrates  recent scholarship about the emergence of a particular social-psychology present when the first paper-based identity documents were created. It explains they were accepted and made sense to people. It also walks through scholarship that tracks the material evolution of paper identity documents from when they first appeared to now.

The fourth section of the paper explains how SSI technologies differ from other models of digital identity management—particularly Enterprise Identity, Access Management, and the consumer IdP models. The primary difference is that SSI provides a way to express high confidence digital credentials in a digital format without anchoring identity information to identifiers such as network endpoints under the control of the state or some other corporate entity. SSI provides a way to restore the qualities of paper-based documents in the digital world: once issued to the individual, documents are under his or her control. Individuals can show their documentation to whomever they choose. In addition, SSI improves the efficiency and security of earlier identity systems by limiting the information that individuals must reveal to verify aspects of their Identity.

I am a practitioner who works day in and day out with technologists, business leaders and policy makers. I work in communities full of sincere people working hard to develop good designs for emerging digital identity systems. I am a “natural academic” and have read extensively across a range of disciplines, including those focused on systems design and understanding, and use my literacy in these areas in this paper.

The paper explains the underlying systems design of both paper-based and digital identity and explores qualities of each in a historical context. This includes exploring them both on their own and together where they intersect  in the real world as SSI-based systems designed by Western liberal democracies (New Zealand, Canada, United States, European Union). r.   

One can not reasonably write about identity without at least acknowledging the philosophical questions of identity. These have likely existed since human beings first achieved consciousness. We find them throughout all cultures in our myths, stories, religions, and philosophies. The primary questions being asked: “Who am I?”, “Am I more than just my body?”, and so on. I am setting aside these legitimate paths of exploration, choosing to ground human identity in a historical materialist approach. This approach sees “all structures that surround us and form our reality (mountains, animals, and plants, human languages, social institutions) as the products of specific historical processes.”

Before proceeding, I must emphasize that everything in this historical materialist tradition results from a process Every “thing” that you can point to, that you can identify, results from emergent processes over time. Our lives as human beings in bodies are the result of processes. The artifacts we create to point to or identify people in the complex society we live in—such as “identity documents”—result from these processes. Identity is a process. 

When discussing “identity,” the physical things identified seem central; however, the historical processes that shaped the document or technology used to express it are often forgotten . Documents containing “identity information” result from historical decisions, accidents, and innovations that helped organizations function. Both a human person and their identity documents have a physicality, but how they came to be, the process of their creation, is as important as their “thingness.” 

I introduce this anchoring frame of understanding historical processes because I will use it throughout the paper to explain the processes of various identity systems. By looking at processes, crucial differences between these systems can be seen and understood. If one simply looks at the “things” or resulting artifacts, the differences are less obvious. Different identity architectures are arrived at through processes that have different implications for people and interact with the power relationships between people and organizations.

Self-Sovereign Identity Technology

The following is  a brief, overview of SSI. It is not a history.  For that I recommend Chapter 16 in the Self-Sovereign Identity book. This section covers the basic architecture and core standards of SSI so that: a) the contrast between SSI and other systems can be discussed in the technology section, and b) the appropriateness of SSI to replace paper-based identity documents can be explored in the final section. 

Verifiable Credentials

Verifiable Credentials (VCs) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification that defines a universal data format for digital credentials and how to share proofs of their authenticity. A credential can assert anything that an entity wants to assert about another entity and is adaptable for many purposes. An example of a government issued credential is a birth certificate. An example of a credential from civil society is a professional association membership; an example of a commercial credential is a loyalty card from a store; and an example of an employment credential is an employee badge. 

Figure 1. Verifiable Credentials diagram from the W3C specification. 

The issuer of the credentials and the receiver of the credentials (Verifier) do not need to directly communicate because of the clever use of public-private key cryptographic technology. The Issuer uses their private key to seal the credentials before issuing them, as structured data, to the Holder. The Holder stores these credentials in their Digital Wallet. As with a physical wallet, the Holder can choose to present the Verified Credentials stored in their Digital Wallet to anyone. 

When the Holder of the credential wants to present them to any receiver/acceptor (called a Verifier in this model), the Holder sends over a verifiable credential presentation. Then, using the Issuer’s public key, the Verifier runs a mathematical computation to check that the data structure originated with the Issuer, who controls the requisite private key associated with the public key, and that it has not been altered. The Issuers share public keys widely (sometimes via blockchain), so the Verifiers can use mathematical calculations to verify the authenticity of the Holder’s verifiable credential. 

Since the initial compilation of version 1 of the Verifiable Credential specification (2018), developers have expanded its effectiveness to better preserve privacy. Holders can now present particular pieces of information instead of the entire credential. So, a Holder could, for example, show just their age in years and not their birthdate. Or, a Holder could prove they served in the military but not have to share in which branch they served  or the dates of their service. Or, a Holder could prove they were a student at a particular school but not reveal their student number. This type of sharing is called selective disclosure. 

Decentralized Identifiers

A management application and associated storage are needed to support the exchange of Verifiable Credentials and cryptographic key materials associated with the Issuer. The application also has to leverage cryptographic key material generated and managed by the Holder, but never stored with anyone. 

The management of this type of material is difficult. Earlier systems used special key registry services that published the public key associated with a particular email address. People who wanted to send a cryptographically secure email to a given address could use the public key associated with the sender’s email address. To decrypt a message from a particular sender, the receiver would look up the sender’s public key and know that it came from that sender. The scale of key management for a Verifiable Credentials system is vast.  A database, like the MIT key server, or a website, like keys.openpgp.org, does not scale,    Relying on such a centralized service would make the system brittle and vulnerable..

On top of that, keys associated with an email address are anchored to a globally centralized system. Innovators of SSI technology decided to store, and manage, keys in a way that is both scalable and accessible but not controlled by a centralized authority. 

Developers need to provide users with persistent identifiers and pointers to cryptographic keys. Still, administrators also need to reassign different keys to an identifier when updating content that those keys unlock. Developers cannot store cryptographic keys in a fixed database assigned to an email address, like the MIT key database described above. Developers need to find another level of abstraction, so that the cryptographic keys can be rotated over time in relation to persistent decentralized identifiers. Blockchains collectively manage databases (either permissioned or permissionless) that once written are not erasable. Although Verifiable Credentials can be issued without decentralized identifiers or blockchains, together both of these innovations provide a beneficial common standard for sharing keys in a resolvable way. Here is a description from the W3C Standard.

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital Identity. A DID identifies any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) that the controller of the DID decides that it identifies. In contrast to typical, federated identifiers, DIDs have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities. Specifically, while other parties might be used to help enable the discovery of information related to a DID, the design enables the controller of a DID to prove control over it without requiring permission from any other party. DIDs are URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) that associate a DID subject with a DID document, allowing trustable interactions associated with that subject.

Each DID document can express cryptographic material, verification methods, or service endpoints, which provide a set of mechanisms that enable a DID controller to prove control of the DID. Service endpoints enable trusted interactions associated with the DID subject. A DID document might contain the DID subject itself—that is, if the DID subject is an information resource, such as a data model.

This [specification includes] a common data model, a URL format, and a set of operations for DIDs, DID documents, and DID methods.

Figure 2. The diagram of the relationship between key components of a DID and DID Document from the W3C DID Specification. 

Decentralized identifiers sit in stark contrast to earlier systems of identifiers that were permanently anchored in either globally managed registries (e.g. Domain Names in the DNS via ICANN or Phone numbers via the ITU-T) or within private namespaces such as usernames at websites (within the domain name system), Twitter handles, or Instagram handles.  

The Decentralized Identifier is a breakthrough in technical architecture that centers control of the identifier within an entity itself (via the software it controls). Identifiers do not need to be assigned by some outside issuing authority; the entities themselves can generate identifiers. Ownership of these identifiers can be proven independent of any “issuing authority.” This proof is achieved by using the properties of public-private key cryptography. 

Decentralized Identifiers do not have to be stored on a blockchain to be valid. The public keys associated with a DID, created and owned by any entity (person or organization), can connect to any other party. Pair-wise, these connections can be unique to the two parties. A specification under development called DIDComm will standardize this type of communication. 

DIDComm sits in contrast to several antecedent technologies, like the cryptographically secure email via PGP. Email via PGP publishes an associated public key, in a publicly accessible way, on a key server. All messages sent  to that address use that key, making it non unique per connection. DIDComm is also distinct from widely used messaging applications that use unique keypairs per connection, like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. These applications avoid user names/identifiers and “cheat” by leveraging phone numbers as a persistent identifier that can identify users in the network. They also do not exchange unique keys per connection with other parties – but rather have a singular public key they share and use for all their connections.

The Historical Evolution of Identity in Computer Systems 

The earliest computer systems were developed and used by business enterprises or organizations, like research institutions. The first computer systems, like the Colossus and Eniac, were created in World War II. They were so rudimentary that there was no need for a “user account.” Shortly after that, large mainframes were developed  to support more than one user interacting with one computer system. Developers invented user-names and passwords to manage access. As a logical next step, the ability to write messages to other users of the same mainframe computer was invented by those early users. These messaging systems were the antecedents of email.

In the 1970s, with the creation of the ARPAnet, large computer systems began to link together by a protocol stack called TCP/IP. By using these connections, users could send messages between computer systems in different cities. Because messages could be transmitted between people in different locations, standards were developed to manage those messages. The standard for transferring messages between computer systems on the Internet is the Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is still in widespread use because it creates a way for anyone with an email address to send a message to anyone else with an email address. These early ARPAnet users began a naming system so that human-readable names could be mapped to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, making email usable for people. Addresses took the form of “user name_@_institution name_._type of institution_.” By default, messages are not encrypted. In the 1990s, PGP key servers were developed to add encryption.

As computer systems within the enterprise became more complex, multiple programs ran on a single large system. Eventually, users needed a single login that would let them access a whole variety of services included in  enterprise systems. This led to protocols to manage the complexity of the enterprise. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) supported the maintenance of directory services so that information about users could be used throughout the enterprise. 

Another protocol called SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) supports federated authentication and authorization both within enterprises and potentially between enterprises. SAML helps manage who has access to what systems. These internal federation architectures, using SAML and LDAP, were the dominant methods of identity management because they made sense in the context of enterprise computer systems. 

These digital Identity management solutions emerged within social and cultural power structures, like employment, where having control “over people” by controlling their identifiers aligned with the power to hire and fire them. Employees did the work for the enterprise—they were not a free persons acting in a social universe of peers and associates or as business customers. Because these original architectures were well-established beginning in the 1990s and solidified in the early 2000s, they shaped the thinking of many identity management professionals about how identity management in the digital realm could be done. 

The architecture of assigning users an identifier and managing it for them was first used not for the consumer internet, but within enterprise systems. A whole field of enterprise identity and access management arose before the web even existed. This control architecture is still widespread and makes sense relative to the inherent power relationship between employees and employers. Companies hire employees to do work. In exchange for that work, they are paid wages. When an employer is not happy with an individual’s work or simply does not have enough work to be done, they will let an employee go. This dynamic of hiring and firing is designed to meet the needs of the enterprise. 

When the employee’s work involves interacting with a computer system, it makes sense that the employer provides access to that computer system. This assignment is made via an identifier/employee number assigned by the employer to that employee. The employee could leverage a shared secret (password) when seeking to access the system doing what is called authentication and then given authorization. Then when the employee no longer works for the company, this digital representation for the employee in the enterprise system should be terminated so they can no longer access the systems – authorization is denied. In other words, access to the system should end for the person who is no longer an employee.  These control structures are part of the original enterprise identity and access management. 

When the first consumer internet arose, companies like AOL and Compuserve offered accounts to users. Social media companies still use this  same system today. Users get this type of identifier when they go to a new service and choose a username within a service’s namespace. This identifier sits within the issuer’s namespace and domain of control. This means that the issuer can terminate the subject’s access to that service’s namespace. 

After picking a username, the user chooses a password. The password is thus a shared secret that both the user and the service know (but no one else). Finally, when the user asserts they are the entity in control of a given username, the service challenges them to also present the shared secret (i.e., the password). In recent years, there has been a push to support the wider adoption of additional authentication factors, some of which use cryptography (like RSA tokens or Yubikeys). However, the process of two or three-factor authentication still involves proving control of an identifier managed by the Identity Provider. 

Figure 3. This diagram shows a Sole Source Topology for Identity where the individual gets new separate accounts for every service they interact in—resulting in individuals having dozens if not hundreds of different accounts at different services and needing to manage just as many user-name and password combinations. 

This way of managing identity has architectural control properties quite similar to the enterprise control over employee accounts. Federation expands the use of the identifier beyond the one site or service. Services known as Relying Parties encourage new and returning users to leverage an account from another service. These Relying Parties require that users prove they have control of an identifier on that service. Once control is proven, the users gain access to the Relying Party’s site. A standard called OpenID was invented at a conference facilitated by the author to support this type of transaction. It led to the proliferation of “sign-in with” buttons, which let users use their Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Github, or other ID to log into a range of websites.  

Figure 4. The flow of an OpenID Connect connection that has an Identity provider. 

While this model, in theory, leads to a variety of Identity Providers, in practice, very few emerged because of the “NASCAR Problem.” Only a few Identity Providers can fit on a given login screen, so users have very few choices for Identity Providers. 

Self-Sovereign Identity technology stands in stark contrast to its antecedent technologies:  topologies  of single-source identity and identity federations. SSI differs from earlier digital identity systems because the receiver/accepter of a credential can be assured of its veracity without directly connecting to the issuer. Receivers don’t have to make a phone call to check a document, and they don’t have to establish a technical federation using a protocol like SAML or OAuth to ping a database of the issuer. 

It is also worth comparing these digital technologies with the embodied Identity of humans. As human beings navigate a social world in physical space, they show up in their physical bodies, associated clothing and are recognized by others. In effect, their bodies and clothes are an “authentication factor” because our memory of people is tied to their physical form. When the physical world’s social, human process in the physical world is translated into the digital world, identifiers are assigned to people by organizational entities that ultimately have control over those identifiers. This means that people are becoming disconnected from their social world, where Identity is individually asserted and socially recognized. The platforms that host, manage, and control our digital identifiers are within their rights to delete our digital identities and even reassign our identifiers to others. We are not free people in these systems because we are directly under the authority of these mega identity providers.

Figure 5.  This diagram shows how the identity providers dis-intermediates individuals from other organizations they connect with by logging in via their Identity Provider.

All the social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter manage their own name-spaces. These platforms also own the connections between the people who have accounts on their services. This means that the social fabric of our society, translated into the digital realm, is owned by these platforms and not by us—the people who are connecting to each other. 

DIDComm, explained above, can provide an alternative to this control architecture. With this new Self-Sovereign Identity technology, we the people own (via software we control) the digital identifiers we use to connect to other people. With SSI, we control and own our social connection, as expressed in the digital realm. SSI technology provides a reclamation of the social, digital commons from its enclosure by the mega-Identity providers like Google and Facebook.

Figure 6. The timeline of key points in the development of computer/digital identity systems from the first computer systems to the present day.

Contemporary Institutions and Paper-based Identity Documents 

This section looks at two phenomena: the origins of contemporary institutions and the origins of identity documents in relation to those institutions. Their histories are woven and interrelated. I am taking this approach because identity documents issued by various institutions are taken for granted, and it is assumed that “it was always this way.” Several years ago, a gentleman who works with the UN was on a panel at a conference asserting that “states have always issued identity documents to people.” This can seem true because, in our living memory, it has always been so. However, I had to pipe up as a ‘panelist from the floor’ to remind everyone that, in fact, the passport system was only started 100 years ago. It has emphatically not always been this way. So how did it come to be? 

Colin Koopman wrote in How We Became Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person: 

I suggest that bringing the politics of information into view requires extending the scope of our historical analysis to the period preceding wartime information sciences and the postwar information theory to which they gave rise. 

Koopman, C How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

His book has a whole chapter about the origins of the bureaucratic birth certificate system we have today; his book looks at the history of forms and processes used in the US between 1913 and 1937. For this historiography, I want to push the timeline back even further to consider deeper questions about why systems of birth certificates and other forms of documentation appeared in Europe centuries earlier. I believe that we have identity documents because we have non-kin-based institutions that require identity documents to function. These two things – documents and institutions (which have governance mechanisms) – together help create complex networked contemporary society and, below, I make this argument in several different ways. 

I am drawing on recent scholarship highlighting the key emergent processes that created 1) new institutions in Europe and 2) the social psychology of people who saw themselves as “individuals” with “identities” of their own relative to these institutions. Identity systems created  by institutions predate any digital systems by millennia. Moreover, these pre-digital identity systems have a material logic informed mainly by the physical reality of paper, which was the available technology substrate to manage these systems.  

Many histories of modern identity systems often begin in the Middle Ages with letters of introduction, then move on to birth certificates, census receipts, and citizenship papers. We will get to that history. However, it is worth asking, “Why did these technologies of Identity make sense to the people who adopted them?” and “What happened in the preceding thousand years in Europe to make this technology of identity documentation acceptable?” 

To get at this more in-depth history, I draw on Joseph Henrich’s book The Weirdest People in the World. In it, Henrich describes cultural forces that were set in motion by the Catholic Church beginning in the 500s. Beginning around this time, the church imposed a marriage and family program (MFP) that banned cousin marriage. This eventually extended all the way to 7th cousins—they had the tools to do this tracking back seven generations (or 140 years) via baptismal records or logs. This documentation of who was baptized served as a precursor to the state issuance of birth certificates.  

As part of MFP they imposed other norms that prohibited close family members who were not blood related from getting married. My sisters husband is my brother-in-law. This term originates from the MFP and comes from this time – it was in church law that one was considered a brother. If my sister died and my brother-in-law wanted to marry me he would be prohibited from doing so even though we are not blood relatives but relatives according to the law (of the church).  

Keeping records to avoid cousin marriages, while an interesting antecedent to birth certificates, does not explain the cultural shifts that lay the ground for people thinking of themselves as individuals. The breakup of cousin marriages effectively broke apart intensive kin-based institutions that linked people together based on family ties. Without these kin-based institutions “to organize production, provide security, and endow people with a sense of meaning and identity, individuals were both socially compelled and personally motivated to relocate, seek out like-minded others, form voluntary associations, and engage with strangers.” 

As kin-based systems broke apart over hundreds of years, people moved to towns and cities and joined religious institutions like monestaries in much larger numbers beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries. It was in these places that proto-WEIRD psychology emerged, involving

analytic thinking and non-relational morality. These changes favored the development of impartial rules that granted privileges and obligations to individuals, while also creating impersonal mechanisms for enforcing trusts such as accounting records, commercial laws, and written contracts. The new social organizations created new ways for human social groups to be organized and operated that were not based on kinship ties. There was experimentation, and other institutions copied and spread good ideas.

 Below are the core elements Henrich describes as defining WEIRD psychology: 

1. Analytic thinking: This grew in importance as people navigated the world of “individuals” rather than dense familial interconnections, reducing the importance and value of holistic thinking. 

2. Internal attribution: As social life shifted to the individual, “traits like dispositions, preferences, and personalities as well as mental states like beliefs and intentions became important. Soon lawyers and theologians even began to imagine that people had ‘rights.'”

3. Independence and nonconformity: “In a society with weak kin ties and impersonal markets,” individuals focused on their uniqueness rather than venerating ancient wisdom and elders. 

4. Impersonal prosociality: With life being governed by impersonal norms for dealing with strangers, “people came to prefer impartial laws that applied to their groups or communities (their cities, guilds, monasteries, etc.) independent of older social relationships, tribal identity, or social class.” 

As beliefs and values changed, the material possibilities in people’s lives did too. As a result, new opportunities emerged for how society could be organized.  

“As intensive kin-based institutions dissolved, medieval Europeans became increasingly free to move, both relationally and residentially. Released to choose their own associates—their friends, spouses, business partners, and even patrons… Constructing their own relational networks opened a door to the development and spread of voluntary associations, including new religious organizations as well as novel institutions such as charter towns, professional guilds, and universities.”

Henrich, JosephThe WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020. 

When looking at these slow, but over-the-long-run significant, social shifts, we can ask: “Why did identity systems of institutions emerge when they did, and why did people choose to adopt these technologies?” Because these newly emergent assemblages were not defined by familial/genetic ties, people needed to find ways to support defining who had entered the boundary of the institution. The institutions needed tools to remember who was part of the institution and who had left. E.g.: In the case of guilds, knowing who their members are; in the case of towns, knowing who residents are; in the case of the military, knowing who makes up the soldiers in military units; or in the case of hospitals, knowing who the medical patients are. The one technology available to do this was a paper-based record-keeping system. This commonly took two froms : log book lists or cabinet files. Both ways involved keeping track of who was in a social formation. These systems could also involve a letter or certificate given to the person themselves. In the case of university, institutions needed to track students as they matriculated through the institution, verify those students graduated from an institution with a degree, so they communicated that via paper certificates with the seal of the institution. 

This process of identity formation and boundary creation is not unique to human social systems, institutions, or assemblages, but also part of how biological networks function. 

Social networks exhibit the same general principles as biological networks. There is an organized ensemble with internal rules that generates both the network itself and its boundary (a physical boundary in biological networks and a cultural boundary in social networks). Each social system—a political party, a business organization, a city, or a school—is characterized by the need to sustain itself in a stable but dynamic mode, permitting new members, materials, or ideas to enter the structure and become part of the system. These newly entered elements will generally be transformed by the internal organization (i.e., the rules) of the system.

One way that these boundaries are created and sustained was via paper-based identity systems, and the rules of the organizational assemblies, in turn, shaped how identity systems were operated and  managed.  

“What processes stabilize and maintain the Identity of these assemblages? The spatial boundaries defining the limits of an authority structure are directly linked to its jurisdiction[…] The stability of these jurisdictional boundaries will depend on their legitimacy as well on their continuous enforcement.”

I argue that one of the processes and technologies that arose to stabilize and maintain the identity of these assemblages is paper-based identity systems. Because authority or governance was not based on kinship ties with these new organizations, they “had to decide how to govern themselves in ways that were both acceptable to current members and capable of attracting new members in competition with other organizations.” They did so by “developing laws governing individuals [and thus] developed well-functioning representative assemblies.” 

So, the need to manage who was in and out of these institutions also led to the emergence of novel governance systems because these new institutions emerged and innovated new mechanisms to define their boundaries and membership. This development laid the groundwork for the development of systems of democratic governance, which in turn also required a method of knowing  who was in the organization or assemblage. Today, we see that one of the hallmarks of democratic election systems is the publicly available voter rolls of who can vote and, once the election is completed, who actually voted. 

These systems of people interacting beyond their own kin lead to the emergence of pre-capitalism that developed “a growing repertoire of social norms and organizational practices [that] were cobbled together, described in charters, and formulated into written laws. Lex mercatoria, for example, evolved into commercial law.” These activities meant that strangers were doing business with strangers using contracts to access justice. To get this all to work, the parties with a contract must have a way to express their identity in the contract—one that is recognized by other individuals operating within the context—so they could, if need be, turn to those outside of the contract to help resolve disputes and manage enforcement. In Europe, this need for clearly expressing identity required  various paper-based documents that established Identity and included practices that emerged first around seals. In time seals  evolved to personal signatures that represented individuals’ decisions in a concrete form on contracts.  

Identity systems also serve a mechanism of cultural and meaning transmission over time. Social networks of humans interacting with each other exhibit the same principles as biological networks. “Culture is created and sustained by a network (form) of communications (processes) in which meaning is generated. The culture’s material embodiments (matter) include artifacts and written texts, through which meaning is passed on from generation to generation.”

For pre-digital identity systems, some of the artifacts used to construct meaning are paper documents related to identity information. These documents arise from the processes that institutions implement to create them. There were local authorities that registered births and issued birth certificates so that authorities could prove how old a child was (to prevent child labor) and who one’s parents were for inheritance purposes. 

These institutions are not “people” who are interacting with one another and using bodies as the known common factor to recognize each other. When returning to interact with an institution and its systems, people must represent themselves in a way that is understandable to the institution or more precisely to a person who is acting in a role with that institution. This is done by producing documents issued to the person by either that institution or another institution whose authority they accept. 

These institutional processes require some basic steps of enrollment or registration. Often an indexical number is assigned to an individual—this helps the institution find the records of this person again and add more information to the institution’s record of the person. Often when a person is interacting with institutions, other attributes about the person are often collected and recorded in identity documents, ledgers, and records kept by the institution.

There are several contemporary examples of institutional networks becoming explicit and understanding how people are enrolled with them and later return to represent themselves. In Canada work has been done by the public and private sector to develop a Pan-Canadian Trust Framework that articulates 24 micro-processes involved in creating an identity with high confidence in government-related systems. Global governing institutions like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) have set standards for Evidence of Identity and are seeking to standardize birth registration documentation globally. A whole range of institutions then use birth certificates that result from birth registration in order to recognize people. 

Modern nation-states and the identities that people have in relation to them emerged with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 as territorial states were recognized as legal entities. These entities, modern nation-states, are a relatively new emergent phenomena. They have a physical territorial form, but it is essential to remember that “human social systems[…] exist not only in the physical domain, but also in a symbolic social domain, shaped by the “inner world” of concepts, ideas, and symbols that arise with human thought, consciousness, and language[…]”  

It is important to remember that the state does not just  occupy land but that it also exists in the thoughts and beliefs of its subjects. These thoughts and beliefs arise through a process of social autopoiesis via an autopoietic network (self generating) and via communication:  

“Social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications that are produced and reproduced by a network of communications and that cannot exist outside of such a network.”

Citizenship in territorial nation-states is a significant example of autopoiesis  in action. Mawaki Chango’s research shows that the initial issuance of identity cards to residents in the territory we call France was a crucial step in forming the idea that they were indeed citizens of a nation called France within those people’s minds. This process is replicated worldwide and shapes the beliefs of billions of people who are registered by the states where they live. 

It is worth noting that these state projects to register citizens also imposed naming conventions that we now take for granted. The inherited patronym was designed by states doing such record keeping in early projects to “allow officials to identify, unambiguously the majority of its citizens.” When successful, it went far to create legible people, and they remain the first recorded facts on documents of Identity. 

Here is a brief timeline of the evolution of both identity processes and their accompanying paper-based identity documents.

Figure 7 this presents a timeline of key developments in the history of paper-based identity documents. 

When individuals want to use  information about themselves asserted by one institution to gain access or services at another institution,  paper documents  are the pivot point of sharing that information. When I want to go to a bar and the bar needs to know how old I am—I present my drivers license at the door. The person at the door of the bar does not query a state level database to discern my age. The state has no idea where and with whom I shared my identity information. This is a diagram of how this works. 

Figure 8. This shows how paper documents are issued to and used by individuals. A person petitioning for a document will submit the needed requirements to the issuer (in the case of a birth certificate, the parents will fill out the forms and have the doctors sign them). The issuer, in this case the county registry, issues a certificate that the birth has been recorded in the county register. The individual seeking employment can prove their age by sharing this paper certificate with a potential employer – indeed this was the use case that motivated social reformers in the 1920s to push for universal birth registration that was achieved in the United States by 1940.

This section makes the argument that our current identity systems and their paper-based documents and processes cannot be separated from our complex interlocking institutions from which they spontaneously arose over millennia. We cannot “go back” at a global scale to peer and kin-based identity systems with no material artifacts. Given the pervasiveness of today’s digital technology, we cannot go forward with just paper-based tools to share and prove Identity with institutions that make our complex society function. So what options are there? The next section explores the incompatibility of the Enterprise Identity and Access Model and Consumer IdP model with the underlying architecture of paper based systems and argues that SSI models preserve important desirable qualities of paper-based systems.

The Path from Paper Based Identity Documents to Digital Identity Systems in Alignment with Western Liberal Democratic Values

The question of how paper-based systems can be replicated in the digital realm is not an easy one. If it was easy it would have been done years ago. So let us consider some potential paths that were present a decade ago.  

One could adopt the digital identity management systems and paradigms that emerged for managing the relationship between employees who needed access to digital systems to do their work as discussed in the first part of this paper. Employers assign employees an indexical number, an identity relative to their work at the company, and provision them with an account to access enterprise systems. By default, this enterprise architecture puts the employer “over” the employee with the power to see everything the employee does with their digital identity and terminate the employee’s digital identity in that system. 

So, it would follow in this model that governments can create digital identifiers that serve as persistent network end points for their citizens and then use this digital identifier and account to manage the citizen’s interaction with the state and all realms of life. This puts the state (itself an assembly of many organizations) in the role of providing digital identifiers to its citizens. Digital identities architectured in this way would be controlled and owned by the state. The government would have control over it in the same way that Google and Facebook have control “over” our digital social accounts, and in the same way that an employer has control “over” our accounts as employees in enterprise systems. 

This architecture doesn’t seem right and just within the context of Western liberal democracies. It allows the state to see  an enormous amount of the activities performed by an individual. t gives the state  the power to terminate the digital account and thus the “informational person,” a term coined by Colin Kooping.

Systems have emerged with these underlying architectural designs, and they all began more than 10 years ago before the SSI architectures were created. 
Some nation-states, tiny countries with highly accountable (and largely digitalized and online) institutions and high trust societies such as Estonia and Singapore, are pursuing this model. The central government issues  digital identifiers and leverages that national identifier across multiple contexts. The Indian government has enrolled the  majority of its residents into a system by collecting 13 biometrics (10 finger prints, two iris scans and a photo) from each of them and then assigning them a 12-digit identifier, Aadhaar number. The designers of India’s system imagined this number would be the center of the “India Stack” and could be used by people to login to all digital services both governmental and commercial. The World Bank has been promoting systems based on this model throughout Africa and offering substantial loans to support their implementation.

Figure 9. This is a slide from presentations by iSPRIT about how they envisioned the Aadhaar number of each Indian being at the center of a technology stack. 

The enterprise identity and access model that phones an authorized database repeatedly for authentication is not appropriate for the relationship between a citizen and their state. It is not a viable model for the exchange of information about people between all possible institutions within in a complex society. This is for three reasons: 1) the necessary  technical federation would be complex and vulnerable to cyber attack 2) the state can see all the transactions in which a citizen uses their account, and 3) the state can to terminate a citizen’s account his architecture doesn’t seem right and just within the context of Western liberal democracies. Campaigns against proposed digital identity systems with a centralized IdP design were waged in Australia and the UK successfully. 

When we look at how paper-based documents work, the individual was the pivot point in exchanging information from one institution to another. It is worth noting that institutions who receive shared information  (the Verifier) and want to be very sure the paper-based documents they are presented with are not a fraud might call the issuer to confirm the veracity of the documents. 

Self-Sovereign Identity technologies provide a way to restore key  qualities of paper-based documents in the digital realm. They make the person the pivot point for the exchange of information between institutions. Once issued to the individual, documents are under their control and can be shown to whomever the individual chooses. Verifiable Credentials have even better anti-fraud protections with digital signatures (so the Verifier does not need to contact the issuer). 

Figure 10. Self-Sovereign Identity specific use-case around the issuance and sharing of a verifiable credential in the educational context.

SSI bridges the gap between paper identity documents and digital identity documents in a way that does not put the state or any other institution in control of an individual’s identity. Individuals may issue their own identity documents without the approval of the state. However, to increase credibility, it will be common to share verified credentials with assertions from another party. The individual’s dependence on other parties for credentials is equivalent to their reliance on a community for their reputation in pre-digital times. This aligns with the emergent properties of social, institutional systems over the last thousand years in the European context.  

Figure 11. This shows the two different timelines of computer/digital identity systems and paper based systems.  They are two distinct histories with different needs and business processes that created each of them.  They can meet together in Self-Sovereign Identity  as its underlying architecture is similar to how paper based systems work  translated into digital. 

For better or worse, European models for many types of institutions have been exported around the world. The SSI protocol is broad and widely expressive. It is, as another name for it implies, decentralized, so any entity can use these open standards for any purpose they choose. This means that any institution, including kin-based and indigenous communities, could also use SSI to design credentials and issue them to their members on their own terms. Indeed, in New Zealand, a Maori-owned social enterprise, Ahou is exploring how express traditional kin-based Identity in this new digital format. They are also collaborating with the New Zealand government to have these identity documents recognized by them based on their historical treaty arrangements. 

In summary, SSI preserves or restores some features of earlier paper-based identity systems that emerged over millennia in Europe. Essentially, it provides a real alternative path to express credentials in a digital format that prevents the anchoring of identity information to identifiers as network endpoints under the control of the state or some other corporate entity. SSI improves the efficiency and security of earlier identity systems by limiting the information that must be revealed to verify aspects of Identity. It also reduces both the workload and the security risks associated with repeated checking between the issuer and the Relying Party to verify a credential.

Techsequences Podcast: Self-Sovereign Identity

Kaliya Young · December 9, 2021 ·

I chatted with Alexa Raad and Leslie Daigle of Techsequences about self-sovereign identity: what identity is and how we’ve lost control of our own identity in today’s world.

Click on the link below to listen.

https://www.techsequences.org/podcasts/?powerpress_pinw=252-podcast

“Who are you?”. Answering that may seem at once easy and yet incredibly complex.  In the real world, we are born with, gain or develop aspects of our identity.  But distinguishing who is who is a lot more complex online.  Multiple entities assign IDs and keep track of our activities. Identity models have evolved from the traditional or siloed model to the federated models.  The common denominator however is that you are not in control of your identity. Join us for a conversation with Kaliyah Young, expert in self-sovereign identity, on how we as individuals can gain control over what is uniquely ours: our identity.

What is Self-Sovereign Identity?

Kaliya Young · January 23, 2018 ·

Here is me on a the Creative Futurism podcast talking about Self-Sovereign Identity.  We don’t go into the technology details but stay with the big picture concepts. What is happening is we finally have the pieces coming together for an identity layer of the internet where people are in control of their own identities.
This technology will have significant implications for how people interact with governments, how people manage their relationship with businesses, how we do banking, how we manage our medical and educational records and how we relate to each other peer to peer.

Self-Sovereign Identity is now possible because of these technologies.

Probably the most important one, that is often not recognized or observed that often because we focus so much on technical technologies rather then the social technologies that makes their innovation possible.  I just wrote an article about this for Open Democracy.
The Social Human Fabric: This is critical to why we actually are having these breakthroughs woven together to create the open standards for self-sovereign identity to become real.  A dedicated group of individuals that have been actively meeting face to face twice a year for over 12 years at the Internet Identity Workshop, and other industry events like the RSA Conference, Cloud Identity Summit and the new kid on the collaboration block Rebooting the Web of Trust.
Smart Phones: The iPhone is 10 years old and is key to supporting the individual having a computer in their pocket to manage their identity attributes and private keys.
Cloud Computing:  Key for individuals having  cloud agent and wallet
PKI – Public Key Infrastructure: This is not new either first created over 25 years ago. It is the basis of encrypted communication but there have been huge usability challenges that have prevented usage
Shared Ledger Technologies (also called Distributed Ledgers or Blockchains): Key for storing Decentralized Identifiers and the public keys associated with them. This creates the framework for decentralized yet globally resolvable
Open Standards for Decentralized Identifiers – DIDs: Community leadership worked hard to support those working on decentralized identifiers on block chains to actually collaborate on a minimally common set of protocols.
PairWise or Directed Identifiers: For each relationship with each person or entity in the system individuals create a pairwise identifier – a unique identifier a new DID just for that relationship. This means they don’t leak information by using the same DID for different connections / relationships.
Open Standards for Verified Claims: This work has been going on for many years at the W3C and leverages the Decentralized Identifier standard to empower issuers to issue verified claims to individuals. These include courses taken or degrees issues

How does it work?

This is still being figured out.
I have seen working wallets in the lab.
Individuals have to get an Edge Wallet – an application on their smart phone and set up a relationship with a service provider to support their cloud wallet. Wait a second they have to trust another service? Yep think of this like a bank account – we have a network of service providers that help us store and manage our money – but it is our money – not theirs. We always have the right to move service providers to change who we trust to work on our behalf in this ecosystem.  Then using these tools we create a Decentralized Identifier a DID and this gets published into a distributed ledger. Its a really really long number that we prove we own because attached to it in the DDO (DID Document) is a public key.  In your wallet is a private key that proves you are the owner of the public key in the DDO and thus the owner of that identifier.
All identity information is stored in the cloud agent.  NO IDENTITY INFORMATION IS EVER STORED on CHAIN.
Individuals who want to maintain separation between all their different identities will be able to do so because each relationship has a different DID associated with it.

What can it Do?

This is the infrastructure for individuals to start sharing and collecting identity information that they collect and manage without third parties seeing where they share it/how they transact.
It is also the infrastructure for individuals to start connecting to each other one-on-one to connect with secure encrypted channels for sharing and connection.
It is new infrastructure for social sharing and collaboration providing a place to root individuals identities that provide the opportunity for real alternatives to centralized networks like Facebook.

Identifiers: A Field Guide

Kaliya Young · January 4, 2018 ·

Tim Bouma wrote a post about Trusted Digital Identity.
In it he unpacks several terms including this one

Identifier: Anything (name, numbers, symbols, etc.) that uniquely distinguishes a member of a population from another member.

I don’t think this definition gets at the complexity of all the things that can be identifiers and how to distinguish them from one another.  In 2014 I began working on what I called a field guide to a whole bunch of aspects of identity.  This is the section that I wrote about identifiers.  I am republishing it here and would love feedback – which I will incorporate into this version of the post.   A complementary post is up that looks at a very nuanced discussion of what an identifier actually is What is an Identifier?.
I should say that the frame of a field guide is intentional. We are in a landscape of a range of identifier types – that we need to understand and distinguish among just like the autobahn society created the field guide to birds so we could understand them and their characteristics in different ecosystems.

Identifiers

For people Names are a special class of Identifiers. They are both self-asserted by people and are used to refer to them and acknowledge them in social context.

System Identifiers

In systems, bureaucratic, digital and techno-bureaucratic identifiers are alpha numeric string pointers at/for people in systems.
This may seem simple but their are many different types and a person with a record in a system will likely have more then one type. To get these different types of identifiers I will share different examples.

Persistent Correlateable Identifiers

This type of identifier is re-used over time within contexts and across multiple contexts.
Examples
Student Number – When I enrolled at my university I was assigned an 8 digit student number. This number was persistent over my time as a student at the school. When interacting with school institutions I was asked to share this number so that activity could be linked together across different facets of the institution.

Social Security Number – This number is issued by the federal government to those born in the US as part of the standard process for being born. It is meant to help those who submit money to the SSN system and when they retire be able to collect money from the system.
Aadhar Number – This created by Indian government for each resident of India. To get a  number and individual enrolls all 10 finger prints, two iris scans and a photograph – 13 biometrics. Their is a check to see that this person has not registered already and then a number is issued to them.
Phone Number – People today often have a personal number that they use across many different contexts. It is common place to ask for a phone number to be able to contact a person. What people don’t know is that those are used to look people up in data broker services. The phone number is used to link together activity across contexts.
E-mail Address – Many people have one personal address and use it These are often used across different contexts. What people don’t know is that those are used to look people up in 9data broker services like RapLeaf.

Assigned Identifiers

These are assigned to individuals by systems of government and businesses to support them being re-identified when they return to an entity to interact again.  This is from section 7.4.2 of the PCIM Validation Standard.

Once associated with a person, an assigned identifier uniquely distinguishes that person from all other persons in a population without the use of any other identity attributes. Examples of assigned identifiers include birth registration numbers, driver’s license numbers, and social insurance numbers. The following considerations apply to the use of assigned identifiers:

  • Assigned identifiers may be kept internal to the program that maintains them. Examples of internal assigned identifiers are database unique keys and globally unique identifiers.
  • Assigned identifiers maintained by one program may be provided to other programs so that those programs can also use the assigned identifier to distinguish between different persons within their program/service population; however, there may be restrictions on this practice due to privacy considerations or legislation.
  • Certain assigned identifiers may be subject to legal and policy restrictions. For example, the Government of Canada imposes restrictions on the collection, use, retention, disclosure, and disposal of the social insurance number.

 

Directed Identifiers

A directed identifier is created to support individuals using different identifiers in different contexts. The purpose of this is to inhibit the ability to link records across contexts.
Examples
The British Columbia eID System – This system enrolls citizens and issues a card to them. When the card is used to access different government systems by the citizens. It does not use one identifier for the citizen. Rather for each system it uses a different identifier for the system – an identifier directed for a particular system.

Decentralized Identifiers, DIDs – this type of identifier can be easily created and therefore can be directed – meaning that individuals only use a particular DID for interacting with a particular institution.  The reverse is also true. Institutions can created a separate DID for each connection they have to each individual.  Sovrin and Veres One are working on creating ways for directed identifiers being accessible to individuals and institutions to manage their connections to one another.

Defacto Identifiers

By combining a name names, and key attributes together systems use this combination to create a defacto identifier which uniquely identifies a person often in the context of a whole society. An example is the us of “name” “birth date” and “birth place”. It seems innocent enough to be asked for one’s name, birthdate and place but this becomes a persistent correlateable identifier to link and track activity across many systems. The creation of defacto identifiers that are persistent and correlateable limits people’s ability to control how they present in different contexts.

In the process of creating a feedback loop related to this article Tim pointed to section 7 of this work under development by thePan Canadian Identity Management efforts. Now his definition above makes more sense. In section 7.4 they talk about identity this way.  They are oriented to defect identifiers to ensure uniqueness.

A property or characteristic associated with an identifiable person is referred to as an identity attribute or an identity data element. Examples of identity attributes include name, date of birth, and sex. For any given program or service, identity information is the set of identity attributes that is both:

  • Sufficient to distinguish between different persons within the program/service population (i.e. achieve the uniqueness requirement for identity); and
  • Sufficient to describe the person as required by the program or service.

Section 7.4.1  says this:

The set of identity attributes that is used to uniquely distinguish a unique and particular person within a program/service population is referred to as an identifier

Opaque Identifiers

An opaque identifier is one that does not give away information about the subject it identifies.
Examples of Opaque Identifiers
The BC Government eID program has at its core an opaque identifier on each card – it points to their card record. It is just a number with no meaning. If they loose their card a new opaque identifier is issued for their next card.
Examples of Non-Opaque Identifiers

Examples of Non-Opaque Identifiers

National Identity Number in South Africa contains a lot of information it is a 13-digit number containing only numeric characters, and no whitespace, punctuation, or alpha characters. It is defined as YYMMDDSSSSCAZ:

  • YYMMDD represents the date of birth (DoB);
  • SSSS is a sequence number registered with the same birth date (where females are assigned sequential numbers in the range 0000 to 4999 and males from 5000 to 9999);
  • C is the citizenship with 0 if the person is a SA citizen, 1 if the person is a permanent resident;
  • A is 8 or 9. Prior to 1994 this number was used to indicate the holder’s race;
• Z is a checksum digit.
The US Social Security Number is created via a formula and so the number gives away information about the person it identifiers.
Phone numbers give away information about the metro region that a person was issued the number from.

End-Point

Some identifiers that represent people are also end-points to which messages can be sent.

Physical Address

It is often forgotten in conversations about digital identity that we had a system of end-points for people before networks known as a mailing address. They system of mailing addresses was developed and is maintained by the US postal service.

Network Address

Phone Number – Now with cellular phones people have their own phone numbers (not just one for a household or their workplace as a whole). This permits both voice calls being made, text messages and MMS Multi-Media messages. The name space for phone number originates from the ITU-T. They are globally unique. They are also recyclable.
E-mail Address – These addresses permit people to send messages to the address they have. They are globally unique. The name space for domain names resides with ICANN. They are also recyclable.

Device Identifier

Many digital devices have unique identifiers. Activity on digital networks can be linked together by tracking these activity originating from particular devices even if people using them .

Non-End-Point

These are identifiers that do not resolve in digital or physical networks.

Document Identifiers

Documents like birth certificates have serial numbers that identify the document.

Document Validation Systems

These systems are used to look up which documents are infact valid. When properly constructed they don’t give away any information about the person. Those using the system type in the serial number of the document and information it contains and the system simply returns a Yes/No answer about weather it is valid or not.

Beacons

A beacon actually broadcasts from a digital device a persistent correlateable identifier to any device that asks for it. It creates a form of tracking people and their devices in the physical world.
Examples
RFID chips, cellular phones, laptop computers

Polymorphic

These systems generate different identifiers depending on context.
Examples
The BC eID system way of using one card that then supports the use of different identifiers depending on context.

Time Limited & Revocable

Some identifiers are created and point at a person but are revocable. An example is a phone number that is after one stops paying one’s phone bill for a month is re-assigned to another person. An employee at a company may have an employee number that is revoked (no longer valid) once employment is terminated. A passport number is an identifier that has a time limit it is good for 5 or 10 years. A landed immigrant card (green card) in the US is only good for 10 years.

Un-Revocable

These identifiers are persistent and are not revoked. Examples include Social Security Numbers.

Identifier Issues

Identifier Recycling

Some identifiers are in systems where identifiers that point at one person can be discontinued (they stop paying their phone bill or using their e-mail address) and then the identifier can be re-assigned to a different user.

Delegation (Acting on Behalf of Another)

This functionality is critically to a variety of user populations. Elders who want to delegate access to their accounts children. Service professionals who have contractual relationships with clients such as an accountant managing access to financial & tax records. Most systems are designed with an assumption that people themselves are the only one accessing accounts. This creates a problem when people want to delegate access they have to turn over their own credentials so the person they are delegating to “pretends” to be the actual user.

Stewardship (Care-Taking – Oversight)

Their is another role that is slightly different then delegation when someone turns over a power of attorney like function for a particular account/set of functions. Stewardship of identity is the type of relationship a parent has for a child’s identity or the type of care needed to help the mentally disabled with their interactions online.

The Mesh of Pointers

We end-up with a way that identifiers work together as a web of pointers towards a particular individual.

 
 
 

What is an Identifier?

Kaliya Young · January 4, 2018 ·

Tim Bouma wrote a post about Trusted Digital Identity.
In it he unpacks several terms including this one

Identifier: Anything (name, numbers, symbols, etc.) that uniquely distinguishes a member of a population from another member.

Part of  Tim’s definition resonates with a conversation I had with Jean Russel in 2009 that I thought I would share that to support a very nuanced and specific conversation about what identifier actually are and how they work in the physical world and digital world. This complements the  Identifiers: A Field Guide post.
Identifiers
Kaliya  and Jean Russell share a dialogue, learning from each other about reputations and currency. (I write in third person because I want to attribute appropriately to each, and yet this is done together). We have a sense of the overall map of ideas, and we want to start with some core concepts that the work depends upon.
We begin with identifiers. We discuss below what identifiers are and how they work in meat-space. Our next post covers identifiers in the digital context.
Jean: SO….What is an identifier?
Kaliya: An identifier is a pointer to a person or an object
Jean: A pointer to a person or an object?
Kaliya: There are generic identifiers – rose, cup, chair…
Jean: So a word can be an identifier?

Kaliya: Yes. To have a more specific identifier “the green chair over in the corner” identifies it (the specific green chair) …relative to others in the same context – a room, for example.
Jean: Okay, I think I get what you mean by pointer. An identifier allows you to identify something to someone else in a shared context.
Kaliya: Yes. So people’s names identify them in our shared social spaces. They are identifiers too.
Jean: So in meat-space we are using identifiers all the time when we use language together.
Kaliya: However, I am not my name, I have a name – it points to me. You have a name – it points to you.
Jean: Okay, so the name and what it refers to are not the same thing. One is pointing at the other. And there are different kinds of identifiers, then? Like chair is vague and green chair in the corner is specific and my name is specific to me, pretty much.
Kaliya: Chair is a generic identifier, yes. Well, it is specific to you in a social context. Green chair in the corner is more specific. I might want to identify a very particular green chair. I would look on the chair to find the manufacture serial number for it, or I might want it in my company/personal inventory and “assign” it a number identifier for that specific chair.
Jean: Right, so there are degrees of specificity in identifiers.
Kaliya: So people’s name are specific in a social context. They might be more or less “specific” because there is more than one person named Jean in the world and even with my name there is more then one Kaliya. But in my social world – the people I know – I am the only Kaliya. I know several Mary’s though so I have to get more specific when talking about them using a last initial or a last name.
Jean: Okay, so there is an element of uniqueness that is important in an identifier? To successfully identify the object, the identifier needs to be unique?
Kaliya: Yes, unique within the context.
Jean: So we seem to navigate this pretty well in our everyday lives, and we ask for more specificity when we need it.
Kaliya: Yes.
Identifiers in a Digital Context
Jean: Can you explain what identifiers mean in the digital environment?
Kaliya: So, when I am at a dinner party with two Mary’s and having a conversation you signal who you are talking to/about via gestures and stuff – you layer in more info about who you are talking about. Or you might, in a conversation in digital chat, say “Mary R” or “Mary H” because you don’t have bodies and social gestures to layer in. So when we go into digital realm – on the internet, what is the context we are in. So when someone goes to a website and gets an account, they get a username.
Jean: Right, I do that all the time. What does that mean?
Kaliya: The site – often checks to see if anyone else has that username, if they do…you can’t have it because someone else has “that” identifier already.
Jean: So I might be able to get ‘Jean Russell’ on one site but not on another, for example?
Kaliya: Well likely you wouldn’t have a space in your username, so ‘JeanRussell’ or ‘Jean_Russell’
Jean: Ok, so no space, so the code can read it, but I might get ‘JeanRussell’ on one space but not on another, on that next space I get ‘JeanRussell6′
Kaliya: In a way, identifiers for people are like digital bodies, but they were weird cause they wouldn’t let you bring a “body” from another site/context into their site/context.
Jean: Every site you went to – every new site – they would make you get a new “body” a new identifier for that site. Ah… I don’t want to keep track of all those bodies. This is so annoying. I am one person. I want my name to be the same regardless of what site I am on.
Kaliya: Well yes – exactly, so the question is how do you have a unique identifier, that “works” for you across the whole internet. This is what OpenID does. It creates a way for you prove you “own” or “have control of” (as in knowing the password for an account). You need to be Unique within a bigger context then just that website, so the large sites allow users to take the identifier within their space and use it other places. So you can use your Yahoo! ID or MySpace ID and log into other websites. OR you could go and buy a domain name just for you – and use it. So I own http://www.kaliya.net and it is set up so that I can use it as my open ID.
Jean: Well that seems to make it easier. But I still don’t get how it is working compared to the JeanRussell who already signed into this site I am trying to get into
Kaliya: You are just JeanRussell within that context – that website. Identifiers in the digital world, to be effective – need to be unique globally. URLs are all Unique. There is a name space….and domain names – are unique, a global registry, makes sure that no two people/companies/organizations own the same domain name.

Digital Bodies and User-Centric Identity
Jean: Kaliya, we left off our last chat talking about digital bodies and the importance of context with identifiers. Can you say more about digital bodies?
Kaliya: Well lets start with physical bodies – we have just one of these. So when we walk around in physical space people recognize us because we are in the same body we were last time. We only get one and over time is ages but basically it doesn’t fundamentally change and we can’t “get another one.” Last time we talked about identifiers and having the ability to have a globally unique one that you could take with you around the web. This gives you a freedom to move between websites and take your “digital body” with you. The difference is that in digital space you could make yourself several different “digital bodies or identifiers” that were globally unique that you would use in different contexts.
Jean: I am already a second body by creating the first digital body, right? Since it isn’t my physical body?
Kaliya:   🙂
Jean: So having many bodies is even more to keep track of and create?
Kaliya: The digital identifier you create that points at you – is like another digital body. Maybe you want to just be http://www.jeanrussell.com everywhere on the web. Maybe you want to have a professional life “identifier” and a personal life “identifier” that separates those two aspects.
Jean: You mean I can manage those bodies instead of having each platform define them for me?
Kaliya: Yes. An example that was brought up yesterday here at Super Nova by danah boyd was that of a teacher. That a teacher is working in front of children – they can’t be seen to be sexual (having a normal dating life) or drinking alcohol (as a normal social adult). So this is an example where someone in that profession would create an identifier they use to connect to their students on social networks and comment on blogs etc.
Jean: Right. That makes sense. Even in my physical body in the analog world, I am showing different facets of myself in different contexts.
Kaliya: They need to have a different identifier they use for their social connections to other adults – in their dating/social life. That same teacher might be politically active – as they have a right as a private citizen to be and those political views well within the spectrum of points of view that are acceptable might not be “the same” as those in their particular town or neighborhood – say a strong environmentalist in a very coal producing town. So they want to take action and voice opinions and share with others who are other active citizens. They would need a different digital identifier for that.
Jean: So, it feels like an advantage to have the ability to manage these digital bodies based on the context they show up in? And thus the community they mesh with in that context?
Kaliya: Back to our first conversation it would be great if they didn’t have to get a new identifier each time they went to a different environmental site – a portable one for them within that context of environmental activists. Yes, contextual management is important. The tools to support individuals doing this are just beginning to be conceptualized and developed.
Jean: So what I hear you saying Kaliya, is that we need our digital bodies to be a reflection of the facets of ourselves and the intersection of those facets with the communities we participate in. This is not defined by platform as much as it is our practices online.
Kaliya: Yes – an we need open standards that give us the freedom to move around the web with identifiers (digital bodies) from one website to another. This has to do with the underlying architecture of the social web that platforms build on. How we use these platforms and tools is complex. To have good practices, we need development of “web” (which had internet below it) and then on top of that is a layer where identifiers are – and applications that use them. then there is an emerging set of standards to move information we generate in social contexts around between sites these are called activity streams. So a website is a context, a group within a site is a context too. Each google group you are in is different – its own cluster of people.
Jean: Right, although there might be some overlaps, that can’t be assumed that I want to show the same facet of myself to all of my google groups.
Kaliya: There are sort of meta contexts – so a network of environmental activist sites would be an example of that.
Jean: Right, a site like Zanby does that for One Sky. Or Ning, or is that more of a tech context and not a purpose context. [Kaliya: and neither uses OpenID]
Kaliya: I guess you can think of it as topic contexts and platform contexts. One of the issues is that most platform contexts do not support being able to switch between different login/handles/identifiers very easily at all. You might have a personal yahoo account and a professional one, on ning too, same deal.
Jean: Right, like on twitter, I was working around that by using api clients or using different browsers!
Kaliya: Right, or logging in and logging out. Mozilla is working on a project to help people manage their ID’s within the browser. The platforms would like us all to “just have one identity” and not switch between but this is not realistic.
Jean: Right, getting back to that teacher example – she may want to be in touch with students on facebook… and want to keep her personal life in a different name there. So we have a social practice for doing that, but the tools don’t yet adequately reflect that.

Talk at TEDx Brussels

Kaliya Young · October 19, 2016 ·

I was invited to give a talk at TEDx Brussels.
I explain Identity in the context of the Future. Enjoy!

Rethinking Personal Data: 3 WEF reports

Kaliya Young · October 19, 2016 ·

I met Marc Davis at SXSW in 2010, we instantly clicked and began working together. He was on contract to develop pre-reading material for a WEF meeting in the fall about Personal Data. I contributed significantly to the document which became the basis of the first Rethinking Personal Data project Report, Personal Data the Emergence of a New Asset Class. [click on the image to download the report].
wef1
 
I remained actively engaged in the project and two of the Appendixes in the 2nd report were authored by me.  The MindMap of Personal Data Types and the Value Network Analysis of the Exploitive Personal Data Ecosystem (Both of these are in the My Data, My Value, 6 Sense Making Diagrams) [Click on the image to download the report PDF]
wef2
 
Diagrams that appeared in the third report I helped sketch out with Bill Hoffman. Here is the Third WEF report PDF [click on the document image].
wef3
WEF Report #3 write up on my Blog.
 

WEF Report #3: Unlocking the Value of Personal Data!

Identity 101, Boot Camp for Identity North 2016

Kaliya Young · October 18, 2016 ·

This June I was invited to present the Identity 101 BootCamp ahead of the Identity North Conference in Toronto. People arrived 90 min early at 8am for this presentation.
I walk through some of the core vocabulary for identity (authentication, authorization, enrollment, verification and contextualize the different contexts (Enterprise, Government and User-Centric)  and power structures that operates within. We also include the Identity Spectrum between verified and anonymous ID there is a whole range and some combinations) The presentation ends sharing Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity and the Properties of Identity.

Identity 101: Boot Camp for Identity North 2016 from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

Identity and Social Justice

Kaliya Young · October 18, 2016 ·

I co-presented Identification and Social Justice with Bob Blakley who is the Global Director, Information Security Innovation at Citi as the closing keynote at the Cloud Identity Summit in Colorado.
I gave this presentation in 2012 at the Cloud Identity Summit as the Closing Keynote address. It highlights issues that surround the rich having privilege and able to manage their identities more favorably then the poor.
 

Identification and social justice from Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young

Identity 101 Bootcamp for Identity North 2016

Kaliya Young · June 16, 2016 ·

Identity 101 Bootcamp for Identity North 2016

This presentation was presented as the pre-opening talk at Identity North 2016 in Toronto. It covers the big question – What is Identity? Key Concepts and Terms. Contextualizing Identity for Enterprise, Government and in the Commons.

Identity 101: Boot Camp for Identity North 2016 from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

ID Anthology – the community "cannon"

Kaliya Young · December 14, 2014 · 2 Comments

A few years ago I pulled together the start of a community anthology.
You could think of it as a cannon of key blog posts and papers written in the Identity Gang and circulated around the Internet Identity Workshop and other conferences back in the day like Digital Identity World.
I think with IIW coming into its 10th year and #20 and #21 happening this year the time is right to make a push to get it cleaned up and actually published.
We need to make the important intellectual and practical work done thinking and outlining digital identity that this community has done .  I also have included works that highlight key issues around user-centrism and identity that originated from outside the community of the identerati.
I am working on organizing a crowd funding campaign to raise a small amount to work with a professional editor and type setter get the needed copyright clearances so we can have a “real” book.
In the mean time I have this outline below of articles and pieces that should be included.
I would love to hear your suggestions of other works that might be good to include. It may also be that we have So many that choose to do more then one volume. For this first one my focus is more on early works that were foundational to a core group early on – essays and works that we all “know” and implicitly reference but may not be known or accessible (because they are 6-10 years ago in blogosphere time and that is eons ago) or may not even be on the web any more.
You could comment on this blog. You could use the hashtag #idanthology on twitter. You could e-mail me Kaliya (at) Identitywoman (dot) net. Subject line should include IDAnthology
The book would be dedicated to the community members that have died in the last few years (I am open to including more but these are the ones that came to my mind).

  • Nick Givitosky
  • RL “Bob” Morgan
  • Bill Washburn
  • Eno Jackson

 

Digital Identity Anthology

Context and History from the User-Centric Identity Perspective
edited by Kaliya “Identity Woman”

Forward, Preface, Introduction – TBD
Openning Essay – by Kaliya
Contextualizing the Importance of Identity

Protocols are Political – Excerpts from Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

Identity in Social Context

Identity in Digital Systems

The “Words” – taking time to contextualize and discuss the meaning of words with broad meaning often used without anchoring the particular meaning the author is seeking to convey.

Identity
Trust
Reputation
Privacy
Security
Federation

 
Pre-Identity Gang Papers

Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet (10 page summary)

Accountable Net (summary or key points)

Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searls et al. (some key highlights)

The Support Economy (some key excerpt?)

Identity Gang Formation

Andre Durand’s talk at DIDW way back in the day.

Blog post of Kaliya and Doc meeting at SBC (now ATT ) park in SF –

Dick’s Identity 2.0 talk.

Phil’s Posts

Johannes – early Venn

The Community Lexicon

Laws of Identity + Responses

The Laws of Identity

4 More Laws (by Fen Labalme)

Verifiable, Minimal and Unlinkable (by Ben Laurie)

Axioms of Identity

Key Identity Gang Ideas + Posts

On The Absurdity of “Owning One’s Identity

Law of Relational Symmetry

The Limited Liability Persona

Identity Oracles  (Bob Blakley)

Identity Spectrum version 1   version 2    (Kaliya)

Onion Diagram (by Johannes)

Venn of Identity (Eve Mahler)

Claims and Attributes

Context and Identity

Signaling Theory

Agency Costs

Social Protocols

 What is Trust?

The Trouble with Trust and the Case for Accountability Frameworks

Trust and the Future of the Internet

User-Centric ID and Person-hood.

At Crossroads: Personhood and Digital Identity in the Information Society

The Properties of Identity

 
The Privacy Frame

Ann Covukian’s Take

Daniel Solove’s work

Taxonomy of Privacy

Model Regime of Privacy

Understanding Privacy

The Future of Reputation

Nothing to Hide

Identity and Relationships

A Relationship Layer for the Web, Burton Group Paper

 
Privileged and Not Gender and Other Difference

Genders  and Drop Down Menus

Designing a Better Drop-Down Menu for Gender

Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora

“Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context)

NymRights

There were many posts that arose out of the NymWars that began with Google+ turning of people’s accounts in July of 2012 – I have to go through and pick a good selection of those from BotGirl, Violet Blue and others.

Personal Data Concepts and Principles

Vendor Relationship Management Community,

The Support Economy

Exploring Privacy:

LumaScape of Display Advertising

My Digital Footprint (By Tony Fish)

Personal Data the Emergence of a New Asset Class, WEF Report

Rethinking Personal Data: Strengthening Trust

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less

Visions and Principles for the Personal Data Ecosystem (Kaliya)

PDX Principles (Phil Windley)

Control and Protocol
Its Not so Simple Governance and Organizational Systems Theory

Accountable Net

Visa the Original “Trust Framework”

Life organizes around identity form When Change is out of Control. and Using Emergence to take Social Innovation to Scale.

Intervening in Systems

Closing Essay
 
Appendix 1: Information Practices the Evolution of FIPPs

Drawing on this work.

Appendix 2: Bills of Rights
 
 

 
 
 
“The” Words
 
 
 

A Preliminary Mapping of the Identity Needs in People’s Life Cycles

Kaliya Young · December 14, 2014 · 1 Comment

This start of a paper and idea for an interactive Exercise to be done at the ID360 Conference was written by myself and Bill Aal. It was submitted to the 2014 ID360 Conference put on by the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin.
Over people’s life cycles there are many different “identity events” that occur. While considering how people interact with an identity ecosystem the whole range of lifecycle events must be considered not just those in mid-life career people.  We present a draft Field Guide to the different stages of life naming different key events and contextualizes what identity needs they might have. We also explore a user centric view of the hat looks at the digital lifecycle from the perspective of our needs as people in a social context. This may be contrasted with a view of the digital life cycle from governmental, civil society or business perspectives. We end with exploring the implications of going beyond the tension between privacy rights and institutional desires for security and authentication.
This paper builds on some of the key concepts of the paper also submitted to ID360 by Kaliya Hamlin entitled The Field Guide to Identity: Context, Identifiers, Attributes, Names and More
The first part of the paper draws  the key concepts from that paper and go on to articulate to ask critical questions that are particular to the Digital Life Cycle. It is an attempt to layout a research program for a user centered view of the digital life cycle.
The second part of the paper charts key life stages and identity events along with community and institutional interactions that are likely.  We would like to work with the organizers of the conference to have a interactive wall sized paper map available in the conference center as the event is happening to both consider each phase from the individual’s point of view and the institutions and potentially contextualize the contributions of different papers/presentations on the map.
Key concepts:

Identity is socially constructed and contextual.

More and more at earlier and earlier ages, we are given identifiers by the state, medical institutions and educational institutions that signify who we are in the social field.
How do our identities evolve through an interaction between our bio/social roots and the institutional identifiers we are assigned?

When are we recognized as a person?

Do we think of ourselves as our drivers license, or library card identifiers??Does our online representation play out in the development as human identities?

Self as a Part of Something Greater

We are defined by who we are, connected to our identities as part of something greater.
Do online identities support that sense of being part of a larger whole?

Context of Observation

The context of observation matters for shaping our identities. It defines the scope of our freedom expression our ability to make choices about context. There are three different types of observation that are quite different.
Being Seen – a mutual act. I see you, You see me. We see each other.  ?How do digital social networking identities help us see each other?
Being Watched – This is where one is observed but it is not known by the person who is looked at.  There may be interaction between actors, but there is less of an  “I- thou” quality. How do we know when we are being watched?   In small society social interactions, we grow up being watched and knowing that we are being cared for.
How do our online identities help us be seen as we mature?
Being Stalked – This is what happens when the watching shifts from an appropriate happenstance window of time and space to  watching over time and space – to following and monitoring our behavior without our knowledge. Recent attention to government surveillance and corporate access to our most intimate online interactions gives rise to anxiety over privacy/anonymity.
How do we create principles that allow for control over the stalking?

Self in Mass Society

The self is shaped differently by living in a mass society.
The first systems of mass identity were paper and bureaucratic record keeping of the state as way to give abstract identity to citizens to provide them services and to control their movement. It is vital to remember that we are not our government issued paperwork.
We are people with our own identities, our own relational lives in our communities. We must not mistake how identity in mass society operates for what it is a system, a set of technologies to manage identity in mass society.
How can we create systems of digital identity that recognize and support our having continuity across governmental, educational and medical systems, that protect our first amendment and privacy rights?

Self in Communities

Communities provide the middle ground in between the Small Society and Mass Society modalities of Identity. Communities of interest, communities of practice and geography give us the affordance to move between different contexts and develop different aspects of ourselves. This type of contextual movement and flexibility is part of what it mean to live in cities and particularly large cities, where people in one context would not necessarily share other contexts. We need to work to ensure the freedom to move between communities is not implicitly eroded in the digital realm. One key way to do this is to build digital systems that people have the capacity to use non-corelateable identifiers (pseudonyms) across different contexts they do not want linked.

Self in relationship to Employers

The power relationship between an employee and an employer is quite clear.  This power relationship is NOT the same of an individual citizen’s relative to their government or the power relationship of a person relative to communities they participate in. There is a tension between the employers rights and responsibilities and the individual employees rights and responsibilities.
For example, should an employer have the “right” to access an employee’s private social network activities, or surveillance of their life outside the workplace?
What are the digital assets that are uniquely the employer or employee?
How can standards apply across the business world??
Other areas we wish to explore:

  • Self in Relation to Peers
  • Self in Relation to the Education System
  • Self in Relationship to the Medical System and Social Services
  • Self in Relation to the State

Power and Context

The Self in a Small society is embedded in a social mesh one can not escape. There is no “other place” and one is defined in that society and because it is so small one can not leave. The self in a Mass society is in a power relationship with the state. Where one has rights but one also must use the identification system they issue and manage to interact and connect with it.
The self in community gets to navigate a myriad of different communities ones each with its own social constructions and how power operates and flows within it. (egalitarian, religions, social)communities, work places (traditional owner – worker | worker owners | holocracy).  These communities, needs and responsibilities change over a person’s lifetime.
How can consistent, yet user centered identity frame works support this development?

Where to Start

The start of all our conversations about people’s identity comes from being embodied being in a social context.  Online digital identifiers and systems at their best should support the unfolding of our identities, help us access institutional and government services, as well as help those systems provide better service.

Contexts in which Identity Lifecycle issues arise:

We are at the beginning stages of exploring how from a person’s perspective, their online identities can evolve.  This is in the process of being refined by looking at the identity needs of the individual, the state and businesses and where those interests might clash.  This is a long term research project that we are initiating  The idea is to go  beyond the usual clashes of privacy and personal rights vs big data.  Etc/
This is the beginning of a research project that we are just initiating.
We invite the collaboration of the ID360 and other professional and academic communities.
 

Person’s View Institutional View
Pre-Birth  
Prenatal Screening
Birth
Naming
National Identity Number
Community Acknowledgement
Enrollment in Mass Society
Medical Info
Adoption
Kid
School
After-School
Camp
Sports
Arts
Online social networks
Gaming
Medical
Biometrics
RFID Tags
            
Teen
Self Expression / Identity Exploration Online
School ID
Drivers License
Banking Info
Medical
Sports
Social Networking
Work related
Student
University/Trade School
Student Loan
Social Identity
Adult
Economic Realm
Consumer
Worker
Owner
Owner of major items such as
            Car/Home
            Social Identity
            Computers / Portable Devices
Financial
Community Realm
Political affiliation
local, state/provincial  and national government, rights and responsibilities
(Taxation, licensing, relation to court systems, permits etc)
Voting Eligibility, residential status, citizenship, entitlement programs
Religious Affiliation
Interest Groups
Service Groups
Special Needs
Mental Disabilities
Physical Disabilities
Relational
Married
Partnered
Parental
Divorce
Blended Families
Elder
Retirement
Deteriorating Mental /Physical Condition
Death
Post Death Digital Life

The Field Guide to Identity: Identifiers, Attributes, Names and More. Part 1 Intro + What is Identity

Kaliya Young · December 11, 2014 · 1 Comment

This paper is still being worked on. I submitted it to the 2014 ID360 Conference hosted by the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin and was sent to present it there until I had to back out because I was still sick from attending the NSTIC meeting in San Jose 2 weeks before. Another version will be submitted for final publication – so your comments are welcome.

Introduction

I was attending a day long think tank called Forces Shaping the Future of Identity hosted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and facilitated by the Institute for the Future. A man in the audience pipped up “Are we going to Define what we mean by Identity?” I smiled :).  One can’t go very far in a conversation about identity before someone asks “that” question. It always is asked when space is opened up to discuss the topic.
I have been engaged with communities of technology professionals and with forward looking civil society organizations circling around the question what is Identity for over 10 years. The simple one-liner comprehensive definition that I use is Identity is socially constructed and contextual. However it’s just one line.  This paper is a Field Guide covering core concepts along with a visual language to represent them so we can talk about it in a meaningful way across the whole lifecycle from cradle to grave, both online and off and in other times.  It builds on the model we used for the Field Guide to Trust Models that I co-wrote last year for the ID360 Conference.
Part 2: Names, Part 3: Identifiers  Part 4: Name Space, Attributes and Conclusion.
This is Part 1:

What is Identity?

Identity is socially constructed and contextual.

Our sense of self arises first from our social interactions with our family of origin.  Humans are unique animals in that 80% of our brain growth happens outside of the womb in the first three years of life. Our family of origin is within the context of a community and in this age broader society that ultimately reaches to be global in scope.
The names we have, identifier systems, attributes that are articulated all depend on our context and from there the social constructions that define these.

Sense of Self

We are told who we are by our family – they give us a name and share with us who we are.
When does it begin? When people recognize you?
When are we recognized as a person?  Different cultures have different traditions.
I have had a connection with the 3HO Sikh community. When a woman is 120 days pregnant there is a celebration to welcome the spirit of the child into the community. Women who give birth in that tradition stay at home and don’t go out for 40 days after the child is born.

Self as a Part of Something Greater

We are defined by who we are connected to. Our identities as part of something greater. Children seek to understand their environment to understand where they fit in. An example from my childhood is one my first memories.  I remember a Canada Day Celebration we attended in Hastings Park. Being Canadian is to be mutli-cultural. The day had different ethnic communities performing on a stage different folk dances while dressed in traditional dress. At some point they handed out Canadian flags on 30 centimeter (12 inch) flag poles with a stand made out of shiny gold colored plastic in a box. It symbolizes this point in time where I understood myself to be part of something bigger to be part of the nation I was born in along with understanding some key values.

Projection of Self

We begin to understand who we are by projecting ourselves into these contexts we find ourselves and learning from the response – shaping ourselves.
There is an African saying/word –  Ubuntu – I am because you are. We are the authors of each other.

Context of Observation

The context of observation matters for shaping our identities. It defines the scope of our freedom expression our ability to make choices about context.
There are three different types of observation that are quite different.
Being Seen – a mutual act. I see you, You see me. We see each other.
Being Watched – this is where one is observed but it is not known by the observee. However it is known to the observee that they might be watched for example walking down one’s street, one knows that one could be seen by any of one’s neighbors looking out their window. One also knows that being inside of one’s own home prevents one from being watched. When walking into a store one knows that the storekeeper will see us, watch us in the store and we know that when we leave the store they will not be able to watch us. When we return to the same store they will likely recognize us (because we are returning in the same body) and know something about us based on prior interactions. In time a relationship of knowing might develop.
It should be noted that our bodies in physical space give away attributes about us that we can not proactively hide. Because we live in a society that is full of implicit bias the experiences of different types of people is different in the world.  Banaji’s work on implicit bias is a starting point. Following the Trayvon Martin verdict the president gave a speech where he said that before he was president he regularly was shadowed while shopping in stores because he was stereotyped. My partner had this happen to him this fall while shopping at Old Navy and it was not the first time.
Being Stalked – This is what happens when the watching shifts from an appropriate happenstance window of time. To watching over time and space – to following and monitoring our behavior without our knowledge.

Self in Small Society

I have often heard it said that with the advent of what appears to be ubiquitous digital identity and the fact that we can be “seen” is just like it was when we lived in small societies.

In small societies it is said that there is no privacy – everyone knows everyone’s business. Their is another layer there is a relational human connection that weaves the people in this context together.
They know each other, they can understand when they are seen and know they are being watched as the move about town.
In a a small society you also know when you are not being watched when you are in your own home with your blinds drawn.
A mesh-network of relationships that form over life and inter-generationally that inform identity and role in the society.

Self in Mass Society

The self of is shaped by living in a mass society.
We developed systems using the technology of paper and bureaucratic record keeping of the state as way to give abstract identity to citizens to provide them services. This began first with the pensions given to civil war veterans. In the 1930’s a system was developed to support people paying for and getting Social Security benefits. The advent of cars as machines that people operate gave rise to the development of licensing of people to be able to drive the vehicles. These all assigned people numbers by the state so they can present themselves to the state at a future time and be recognized. It is vital to remember that we are not our government issued paperwork. We are people with our own identities, our own relational lives in our communities. We must not mistake how identity in mass society operates for what it is a system, a set of technologies to manage identity in mass society.

Self in Communities

Communities provide the middle ground in between the Small Society and Mass Society modalities of Identity. Communities of interest, communities of practice and geography give us the freedom to move between different contexts and develop different aspects of ourselves. This type of contextual movement and flexibility is part of what it mean to live in cities and particularly large cities. Where people in one context would not necessarily share other contexts. The freedom to move between different contexts exists in the digital real. The internet enabled those in more remote locations to also participate in communities of interest and practice well beyond what they could access via their local geography. We need to work to ensure the freedom to move between communities is not implicitly eroded in the digital realm. One key way to do this is to ensure that people have the freedom to use non-corelateable identifiers (pseudonyms) across different contexts they do not want linked.

Self in relationship to Employers

The power relationship between an employee and an employer is quite clear. The employer does the vetting of potential new employees. They are hired and given access to the employers systems to do work for them. When the employee was no longer working for a company because of any number of reasons – retirement, resignation, termination – the employer revokes the employees ability to access those services. This power relationship is NOT the same of an individual citizen’s relative to their government or the power relationship of a person relative to communities they participate in. In both cases the person has an inherent identity that can not be “revoked”.

Power and Context

The Self in a Small society is embedded in a social mesh one can not escape. There is no “other place” and one is defined in that society and because it is so small one can not leave.
The self in a Mass society is in a power relationship with the state. Where one has rights but one also must use the identification system they issue and manage to interact and connect with it.

The self in community gets to navigate a myriad of different ones each with its own social constructions and how power operates and flows within it. (egalitarian, religions, social) communities, work places (traditional owner, worker | worker owners | holocracy).

Abstraction

The start of all our conversations about people’s identity comes from being embodied beings. The beauty of the digital realm is that we can abstract ourselves from our bodies and via digital identities interact via digital media. This gives us the freedom to connect to communities beyond those we could access in our local geographic location.
Atoms and Bits
Atoms and Bits are different. The difference between them is still not well understood.

  • “Atoms” Physical things can only be in one place at one time.
  • “Bits” Can be replicated and be in two or more places at once.

Physical Body

Atoms – We each have only one physical body. Our physical bodies can only be in one physical place at once. It is recognizable by other humans we meet and interact with. Because it is persistent we can be re-recognized and relationships can grow and evolve based on this. When we move between contexts in physical space – we can be recognized in different ones and connections made across them. We also have social norms, taboos and laws that help us maintain social graces.

Digital Representation

Bits – When we create digital representations of ourselves we get to extend ourselves – our presences to multiple places at the same time. We can use a digital identity that is strongly linked to the identity(ies) and contexts we use/have in the physical world. We also have the freedom to create a digital representation that steps out of the identity we occupy in the physical realm.
We can be an elf or an ork in a online game.
We can cloak our gender or choose to be a different gender.
We can cloak our race or choose to be a different one when we represent ourselves online.
We can interact on a level playing field when in the physical realm we are confined to a wheel chair.
These identities we create and inhabit online are not “fake” or “false” or “not real”. They are representations of the self. The digital realm is an abstraction and gives us the freedom to articulate different aspects of ourselves outside of the physical world.

Digital Dossier

In the digital realm because it is en-coded means that our our movements around digital space leave trails, records of the meta-data generated when we click, type, post a photo, pay for a song do basically anything online. We leave these behind and the systems that we interact with collect them and reconstruct them to develop a digital dossier of us. This behavior if it happened in the world of atoms in the physical space would be considered stalking. We have a stalker economy where our second selves are owned by corporations and used to judge us and target things at us.

Power in Space & Relationships

The freedom of people to transend aspects of identity from the physical world is disruptive to some of default power dynamics.

Disrupting Privilege

The push back against Google+’s requirement for the use of “real names” was lead by women and others who use the freedom of the digital realm to step out of the bias they experience in the physical world.
The people who were pro-real name were largely white men from privileged positions in the technology industry and implicitly through the support of the policies wanted the default privileges they enjoyed in the physical realm to continue into the digital.

Shape of Space

In the physical world we understand how different physical spaces work in terms of how big they are, how many people are in them, what the norms and terms and conditions are. We know that based on these we have a social understanding.
The challenge in the digital world is that the space is shaped by code and defined by the makers of the contexts. These contexts can change at their will. As has happened repeatedly with Facebook’s changing settings for who could see what personal information. This instability creates mistrust particularly by vulnerable people in these systems.
The commercial consumer web spaces currently have a structure where they collect so much information about us via their practices of stalking us digitally. They have enormous power over us.

The Field Guide to Identity: Identifiers, Attributes, Names and More. Part 2: Names

Kaliya Young · December 11, 2014 · Leave a Comment

This paper is still being worked on. I submitted it to the 2014 ID360 Conference hosted by the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin and was sent to present it there until I had to back out because I was still sick from attending the NSTIC meeting in San Jose 2 weeks before. Another version will be submitted for final publication – so your comments are welcome.
Part 1: Intro + hat is Identity?   Part 3: Identifiers  Part 4: Name Space, Attributes and Conclusion.
This is Part 2:

Names

Names are what we call ourselves and what others call us. They are a special kind of identifier because they are the link between us and the social world around us. We present ourselves using names so people know how to refer to us when talking to others or call us when they are talking to us. They convey meaning and have power.
Digital devices can also have names are defined by the administrators of these devices. Places have names given to them by people in a given context these help us refer to a geographic location. It should be noted that the names first nations (indian or native american) people had for places are different then the ones that the American’s colonized their land used.

Given Names

These are the names our parents give us when we are born. In America we have a naming convention of a first name and last name. This convention originates from ___ when states were seeking to impose control.

Name structure in various cultures

Different cultures have very different naming conventions. In Hong Kong their is a convention of an english first name written in English and a Chinese character written last name. In Mayanmar everyone has a first name.

Meaning in Wisdom Traditions

Different wisdom traditions ascribe different ways to interpret and ascribe meaning in names.

NickName

These arise when people start to refer to us by a different name then the name we might give ourselves. We can take these on and they can become our name. They might arise from our families, from school, from sports teams, social clubs, work places. In these different contexts, the name that we are referred to may have nothing to do with the name our our birth certificate and the people using the name to refer to us.

Name on Government Issued Paperwork

We have a convention in the liberal west of registering names with the state. This originated out of several practices in the last several hundred years. One key aspect of this is to both provide services to citizens but also to control citizens.

Pen Name / Stage Name

A name used by artists for their artistic expression and authorship. It does not match the name on government issued paperwork and is often used to obscure the link between such authorship and government paperwork names so that they are free to express themselves artistically.

Autonym

A name that one uses to refer to themselves. An example is that when Jorge Mario Bergoglio became pope he chose to become Pope Francis.

Pseudonym

A name that one uses to interact in various contexts that may be linked one’s name on one’s government issued paperwork. Bob is clearly linked to the name Robert or Barb to Barbara or Liz to Elizabeth on government issued paperwork. It is important to note that many non-european languages also have examples of these.

Mononym

This is name consisting of a single word. Examples include Stilgarian and Sai. Madona or Cher are examples of Pseudonymous, Mononym, Stage Names

Handle

A name that one uses to represent ones digital identity in online contexts. It arose in computer culture when people needed to have a user name within a computer system. This is closely related to Screen names.

Screen Name

The name that one chooses to have displayed on screen. In a system like World of Warcraft the service knows identity information of their clients who pay monthly to access their service. They choose to support those player presenting to the other players on the system and forums a “screen name” that reflects their gaming persona or character name.

Name Haystack

Different Names have different qualities of hiding in the haystack of the similar or the same names. Some people have huge name – haystacks where tens of thousands people have the same name – Mike Smith, Joe Johnston, Mohamed Husain, Avi Blum, Katherine Jones. Mike Garcia who works for NIST said that there were 17 different Mike or Michael Garcia’s. People use pseudonyms to help manage the fact that name-haystacks exist making them more or less identifiable depending on the size of theirs.

Roles

RBAC – Roll Based Access Control is based on managing the rights and privileges for digital systems based on roles. When a person gets a role assigned to them the inherit the privileges.
Community groups also have different roles that might have . Earn role from getting a degree.

Titles, Given and Created

There is a history of titles being pasted down.
Eastern Wisdom Traditions pass them down from guru to student creating lineage’s.
I have had conversations with friends about who the next “Identity Woman” might be. This identity that I have constructed to hold an aspect of my self – work focused on people’s rights around their digital selves. I could see at some point handing this identity over to someone else who wants to continue the torch over.

Collective Single Identity

Theses identities are co-created by two or more people. They are managed and maintained and people jointly act together to create a persona.

 
 
 

The Field Guide to Identity: Identifiers, Attributes, Names and More. Part 3: Identifiers

Kaliya Young · December 11, 2014 · 1 Comment

This paper is still being worked on. I submitted it to the 2014 ID360 Conference hosted by the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin and was sent to present it there until I had to back out because I was still sick.
Part 1:  Intro + what is Identity?   Part 2: Names   Part 4: Name Space, Attributes and Conclusion.
This is Part 3:

Identifiers

For people Names are a special class of Identifiers. They are both self-asserted by people and are used to refer to them and acknowledge them in social context.

System Identifiers

In systems, bureaucratic, digital and techno-bureaucratic identifiers are alpha numeric string pointers at/for people in systems.
This may seem simple but their are many different types and a person with a record in a system will likely have more then one type. To get these different types of identifiers I will share different examples.

Persistent Correlateable Identifiers

This type of identifier is re-used over time within contexts and across multiple contexts.
Examples
Student Number – When I enrolled at my university I was assigned an 8 digit student number. This number was persistent over my time as a student at the school. When interacting with school institutions I was asked to share this number so that activity could be linked together across different facets of the institution.

Social Security Number – This number is issued by the federal government to those born in the US as part of the standard process for being born. It is meant to help those who submit money to the SSN system and when they retire be able to collect money from the system.
Phone Number – People today often have a personal number that they use across many different contexts. It is common place to ask for a phone number to be able to contact a person. What people don’t know is that those are used to look people up in data broker services. The phone number is used to link together activity across contexts.
E-mail Address – Many people have one personal address and use it These are often used across different contexts. What people don’t know is that those are used to look people up in 9data broker services like RapLeaf.

Directed Identifiers

A directed identifier is created to support individuals using different identifiers in different contexts. The purpose of this is to inhibit the ability to link records across contexts.
Examples
The British Columbia eID System – This system enrolls citizens and issues a card to them. When the card is used to access different government systems by the citizens. It does not use one identifier for the citizen. Rather for each system it uses a different identifier for the system – an identifier directed for a particular system.

Defacto Identifiers

By combining a name names, and key attributes together systems use this combination to create a defacto identifier which uniquely identifies a person often in the context of a whole society. An example is the us of “name” “birth date” and “birth place”. It seems innocent enough to be asked for one’s name, birthdate and place but this becomes a persistent correlateable identifier to link and track activity across many systems. The creation of defacto identifiers that are persistent and correlateable limits people’s ability to control how they present in different contexts.

Opaque Identifiers

An opaque identifier is one that does not give away information about the subject it identifies.
Examples of Opaque Identifiers
The BC Government eID program has at its core an opaque identifier on each card – it points to their card record. It is just a number with no meaning. If they loose their card a new opaque identifier is issued for their next card.
Examples of Non-Opaque Identifiers
National Identity Number in South Africa contains a lot of information it is a 13-digit number containing only numeric characters, and no whitespace, punctuation, or alpha characters. It is defined as YYMMDDSSSSCAZ:

  • YYMMDD represents the date of birth (DoB);
  • SSSS is a sequence number registered with the same birth date (where females are assigned sequential numbers in the range 0000 to 4999 and males from 5000 to 9999);
  • C is the citizenship with 0 if the person is a SA citizen, 1 if the person is a permanent resident;
  • A is 8 or 9. Prior to 1994 this number was used to indicate the holder’s race;
• Z is a checksum digit.
The US Social Security Number is created via a formula and so the number gives away information about the person it identifiers.
Phone numbers give away information about the metro region that a person was issued the number from.

End-Point

Some identifiers that represent people are also end-points to which messages can be sent.

Physical Address

It is often forgotten in conversations about digital identity that we had a system of end-points for people before networks known as a mailing address. They system of mailing addresses was developed and is maintained by the US postal service.

Network Address

Phone Number – Now with cellular phones people have their own phone numbers (not just one for a household or their workplace as a whole). This permits both voice calls being made, text messages and MMS Multi-Media messages. The name space for phone number originates from the ITU-T. They are globally unique. They are also recyclable.
E-mail Address – These addresses permit people to send messages to the address they have. They are globally unique. The name space for domain names resides with ICANN. They are also recyclable.

Device Identifier

Many digital devices have unique identifiers. Activity on digital networks can be linked together by tracking these activity originating from particular devices even if people using them .

Non-End-Point

These are identifiers that do not resolve in digital or physical networks.

Document Identifiers

Documents like birth certificates have serial numbers that identify the document.

Document Validation Systems

These systems are used to look up which documents are infact valid. When properly constructed they don’t give away any information about the person. Those using the system type in the serial number of the document and information it contains and the system simply returns a Yes/No answer about weather it is valid or not.

Beacons

A beacon actually broadcasts from a digital device a persistent correlateable identifier to any device that asks for it. It creates a form of tracking people and their devices in the physical world.
Examples
RFID chips, cellular phones, laptop computers

Polymorphic

These systems generate different identifiers depending on context.
Examples
The BC eID system way of using one card that then supports the use of different identifiers depending on context.

Time Limited & Revocable

Some identifiers are created and point at a person but are revocable. An example is a phone number that is after one stops paying one’s phone bill for a month is re-assigned to another person. An employee at a company may have an employee number that is revoked (no longer valid) once employment is terminated. A passport number is an identifier that has a time limit it is good for 5 or 10 years. A landed immigrant card (green card) in the US is only good for 10 years.

Un-Revocable

These identifiers are persistent and are not revoked. Examples include Social Security Numbers.

Identifier Issues

Identifier Recycling

Some identifiers are in systems where identifiers that point at one person can be discontinued (they stop paying their phone bill or using their e-mail address) and then the identifier can be re-assigned to a different user.

Delegation (Acting on Behalf of Another)

This functionality is critically to a variety of user populations. Elders who want to delegate access to their accounts children. Service professionals who have contractual relationships with clients such as an accountant managing access to financial & tax records. Most systems are designed with an assumption that people themselves are the only one accessing accounts. This creates a problem when people want to delegate access they have to turn over their own credentials so the person they are delegating to “pretends” to be the actual user.

Stewardship (Care-Taking – Oversight)

Their is another role that is slightly different then delegation when someone turns over a power of attorney like function for a particular account/set of functions. Stewardship of identity is the type of relationship a parent has for a child’s identity or the type of care needed to help the mentally disabled with their interactions online.

The Mesh of Pointers

We end-up with a way that identifiers work together as a web of pointers towards a particular individual.

The Field Guide to Identity: Identifiers, Attributes, Names and More. Part 4: Name Spaces, Attributes, Conclusion

Kaliya Young · December 11, 2014 · 1 Comment

This paper is still being worked on. I submitted it to the 2014 ID360 Conference hosted by the Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin and was sent to present it there until I had to back out because I was still sick from attending the NSTIC meeting in San Jose 2 weeks before. Another version will be submitted for final publication – so your comments are welcome.
Part 1: Intro + What is Identity?   Part 2: Names   Part 3: Identifiers
This is Part 4:

Name Spaces

Different identifier systems work differently some originate from physical space and others operate purely in the digital realm.

Local

A great example of a local name space in the physical world is a school classroom. It is not uncommon in american classrooms that when there is a name space clash – that is two people have the same name in the same space – they take on different names to be identifiable within that context. Take for example those with the names “Stowe” “Fen” and “Chris” – each is one part of the name Christopher : Chris – Stowe – Fer. When they were in grade school each took on a different part of the name and it stuck with them.

Global

These names spaces mean that identifiers within them are unique and global. Phone numbers, domain names and thus e-mail addresses.

Private

Some private name spaces seem like global name spaces but they are run by private companies under privately decided terms and conditions. Examples include skype handles, twitter handles,

International Registry

These are identifiers in a global space that are registered and managed globally an example is domain names.

Attributes

Self Asserted

These are attributes that people self defined. They include things that are subjective like “favorite color” or “name”

Inherent

These arise from the individual and typically do not change (such as birth date) and are not as morphable. Sex and ethnic identity are things that people have and display in the physical world that don’t (typically) change throughout one’s life.

Ascribed

These are attributes that are given to us by others or by systems. This may include names that are imposed on us by social convention and or power relationships.

Assigned

These are attributes that are given to us by others or by systems.
Examples:
Social Security Numbers are assigned by the Social Security Administration.

Conclusion

Identity is a big topic and outlining the core concepts needed to understand it was the purpose of this paper. We need to think about how the systems that manage identity are structured. Are they designed to have power over people, supporting people having power with one another or enabling power to be networked between us to create something greater then ourselves. These questions are relevant across the whole life-cycle of identity from cradle to grave.

Core Concepts in Identity

Kaliya Young · July 31, 2013 · 1 Comment

One of the reasons that digital identity can be such a challenging topic to address is that we all swim in the sea of identity every day.  We don’t think about what is really going in the transactions….and many different aspects of a transaction can all seem do be one thing.  The early Identity Gang conversations focused a lot on figuring out what some core words meant and developed first shared understanding and then shared language to talk about these concepts in the community.
I’m writing this post now for a few reasons.
There is finally a conversation about taxonomy with the IDESG – (Yes! after over a year of being in existence it is finally happening (I recommended in my NSTIC NOI Response  that it be one of the first things focused on)
Secondly I have been giving a 1/2 day and 1 day seminar about identity and personal data for several years now (You can hire me!).  Recently I gave this seminar in New Zealand to top enterprise and government leaders working on identity projects 3 times in one week.  We covered:

  • The Persona and Context in Life
  • The Spectrum of Identity
  • What is Trust?
  • A Field Guide to Internet Trust
  • What is Personal Data
  • Market Models for Personal Data
  • Government Initiatives Globally in eID & Personal Data

[Read more…] about Core Concepts in Identity

Identity and Context: People and Personal Data

Kaliya Young · November 7, 2012 ·

I gave this talk for EduServe in Birmingham, UK, on November 6th, 2012.

Identity and Context : People and Personal Data from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

Your Identity/Your Data: What do women want?

Kaliya Young · June 29, 2012 ·

I presented to SDForum Tech Women’s group about Identity and Personal Data. I presented and also got input from the women attending about how they understood their own identities and what they want to have happen with their personal data.

ID & Data presented at SDForum TechWomen from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

TEDxConstitution Drive: The Identity Spectrum

Kaliya Young · March 20, 2012 ·

As part of Tedx series focused on Identity, I gave a talk on “The Need for Limited Liability Personas.”

Getting Started with Identity

Kaliya Young · September 18, 2011 · 1 Comment

 
Welcome to the Identity Woman Blog
I am an advocate for the rights and dignity of our digital selves.

Where I am in the World

Latest Media & Papers

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